vocation, meaning, and ethics.
I had one more conversation with someone today about the vision and hope bound up with the word “vocation.”
Is life about anything?
Does life mean anything?
Is getting up in the morning really for anything?
What do we do with the days of our lives?
Why do we choose to do what we do?
Everyday someone somewhere wants to talk about this. Today it was a professor in Minnesota, and we had arranged to talk in the afternoon. We spent a good hour, and both of us were surprised by the richness of the conversation. He has been thoughtful about it, I have thought about it, and together we learned.
I told him about a trip I am making in a couple weeks to Paris, where I have been asked to speak to a group representing a global corporation. They make stuff we all know, in fact that we all love. But they are asking deeper, more serious questions about the very nature of business, and what it means for human beings to flourish, and for economies and cultures to flourish.
They have asked me to speak about vocation and meaning in a globalizing political economy. I must confess that I gulped when the question was first posed, knowing that it was weighty, and that my answer could not be cheap.
So I am thinking about that these days. There are three words they have asked me to reflect upon: vocation, meaning, and ethics– and their dynamic relationship in the context of globalization, knowledge and business.
Perhaps at a deeper level, they were asking a more profound question:
What is the meaning of the “bottom line?”
Is there just one? What if we believed that good business requires a more complex bottom line?
And that leads to all sorts of other questions:
If there is a more complexity to a true “bottom line,” what does success look like?
How do we know if we have achieved it?
What is our responsibility for others in this?
Have we succeeded if others haven’t?
What does opportunity mean, and what is our responsibility for others?
And do we have any responsibility for the earth?
Can we do business in an honest way without an honest concern for the world which is ours?
At the end of the day, I never get far from the question that Wendell Berry posed as I brought a couple of business executives to talk with him on his Kentucky farm about this very idea, the relation of vocation to meaning to ethics, set as it must be within these complex questions. After hours of conversation, he said to us, “If you want to make money for a year, you will ask certain questions. But if you want to make money for a hundred years, you will have to ask different questions.”
Can we learn to ask the right questions? I suppose that is my assignment in Paris.
This article was originally posted at The Washington Institute’s “Commons” Blog
Image by Elyce Feliz. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.
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